Linda McMahon’s Body Count – Dead People – Remains a Taboo Subject

Now The Wall Street Journal has joined the conversation of whether World Wrestling Entertainment’s “image” is a factor in its co-founder and former CEO Linda McMahon’s Senate race in Connecticut.

See “Pro Wrestling’s Image Looms Over Senate Race,” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704525704575341093327012212.html.

Where the elite meet to eat, the dialogue has progressed from wrestling’s raunchiness to wrestling’s steroids. But it has yet to go where it belongs: to wrestling’s deaths. The Journal mentioned only one, Chris Benoit’s 2007 double murder/suicide. And that was mostly to create an opening to discuss the investigation of Congressman Henry Waxman, who breaks his 18 months of silence to provide a quote.

The Journal quoted WWE flack Robert Zimmerman’s rejoinder that Waxman is a “political blowhard.” But the newspaper didn’t get into why Waxman never pulled the trigger on public hearings or, for that matter, how Linda and Vince McMahon finessed a mid-nineties federal criminal investigation.

Still, the McMahon campaign and “image” have taken a black eye. I hear The New York Times is about to tackle the McMahon mystique, too. (No, I haven”t spoken to anyone there.)

Irv Muchnick